“I’m a tenured professor at our School of Education,” a colleague announced at a meeting. “As I’m sure you all know, the field of education is known for its outstanding. . . erm. . . lack of rigor and . . . erm . . . exceptional intellectual shallowness.”
I laughed so loudly that the windows rattled. Everybody else looked embarrassed at stared at the table in front of them.
If you can’t get into med school, try ed school.
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It’s been my experience that, alone among all PhD holders, only people with PhDs in education insist on being called “doctor” everywhere they go.
Has anyone else noticed this?
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Well, people have got to compensate some way. 🙂
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I can rant about applied linguistics for hours.
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Have you noticed how extraordinarily politically conservative people in applied linguistics all are? Every figure of authority for them is a deity never to be questioned. I wonder what causes it.
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What does linguistics get applied to, if not intelligence (in the other sense)?
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Applied linguistics people are in enormous demand these days. They teach a vague selection of vague courses about vaguely defined teaching methodologies. Sometimes, they also teach parts of speech and phonemes. They also detest research and applaud every initiative of the administration.
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I think I need to look at what “applied linguistics” means now because this doesn’t sound like anything I’m familiar with.
The applied linguists I knew were doing stuff like developing tools for literacy and education for speakers of minority and/or indigenous languages.
I suspect that now that it’s been coopted by the ESL (English as a Second Language) or remedial English people.
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I admire your Education colleague’s honesty. It far outstrips anything I’ve seen from say, Social Work.
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Just to be unpopular I’ll mention a couple of people I’ve known who credited education classes with helping their teaching.
One was a close friend who was a TA for a mixed graduate/undergraduate class that people were forced to take (and which they dreaded because it was really hard).
As a TA they got glowing reviews from the students (far better than the professor’s evaluations which made life a little complicated). Many of them credited the TA’s work not only for helping them pass but for actually making them interested in a topic they thought would be horrible and boring going into the class.
The TA told me they just applied what they had learned in classes about teaching 6 year olds, repeating everything in different ways, breaking down hard tasks into smaller easier ones, lots of visual and other heuristic aids, positive reinforcement whenever possible etc.
The second was a few years ago. I had been asked to observe a class taught by a visiting American. They were originally supposed to be a TA but then given the class to do on their own (I was supposed to report if I thought they could handle it).
When I observed, they were phenomenal in class, exhibiting levels of patience and methodicalness that I can only dream of. I started being reminded of my old friend. While we were talking after class they did relate that they were using what they’d learned in early education class.
I think there’s a valuable core in education but it’s not really prone to a lot of new developments and the academic environment is inherently hostile to any set knowledge. Therefore there’s a huge amount of busywork and useless fluff added onto the core of valuable information.
It’s similar in translation where is mostly a small body of necessary theory and a lot of interesting case studies. But to stay in academia translators have to inflate the theory component withe a lot of empty nonsense and endless new formulations of things that people figured out 50 years ago.
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I’m writing a separate post in response to this great comment.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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